Passing through the screen: Pierre Boulez and Michel Foucault

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Summary In this paper I examine Foucault's little essay, “Pierre Boulez: Passing through the Screen”, in which he looks back from the vantage point of the 1980s at Boulez's music of the 1950s and his contribution to the project of aesthetic modernism. Before making a fairly detailed reading of the paper, I examine Boulez's role in the twentieth‐century serial tradition inaugurated by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. Foucault's reading of Boulez focuses initially on the composer's radical break with the past; I suggest that Foucault was in a certain sense talking about his own break with a philosophical tradition founded in experience and conventional meaning. Boulez's experiment in the scientific and formal, I continue, had much in common with the methodologies from the history of science that were to become central to Foucault's thinking. Departing briefly from Foucault's essay, I argue that Gilles Deleuze fully understood why Foucault considered the project of serial music an important model; in fact Deleuze's notion of an “atonal logic” shows how the bodies of statements (énoncé) in different epistemes have the same relationship to each other as do different manifestations of the series in a serial composition. Returning to Foucault's commentary on Boulez, I briefly examine important settings of Char and Mallarmé, showing how they share features of a Foucauldian analysis: conjunctions between words, image and music are never subordinated to conventional meaning but are “justified only by the new necessity they have established”. Finally I look at Boulez as a conductor and interpreter who approaches the past in music with a belief that what he is doing in the present can change it; again the project seems Foucauldian. In conclusion I reflect that both Boulez and Foucault were similarly and at the same time creative and analytical in their work, able always to use thought in order to be able to think differently.